


warped and weathered shades

by mickleborger



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, POV Third Person, endgame spoilers, gore but it's a dream, gore in context of exactly what you'd expect phil to think about doing to radovid, maybe not the firmest grasp of reality, vague gender talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 13:22:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16430195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: of what's been lost and what remains





	warped and weathered shades

**Author's Note:**

> (Oceans of Slumber: "No Color, No Light" in the title and "Fleeting Vigilance" in the summary)

i.

She has flown out of this house a thousand times, knows exactly what path to take off this rooftop.  Every issue out of this haunted city has been tested, and checked, and tested again; lovely as Loc Muinne is, it is a starving cul-de-sac of a ruin, and Philippa Eilhart trusts it exactly as much as any other creature outside herself.

She could not have predicted Radovid's precise actions, but the loss of her sight was not at the bottom of the list of likely complications in any of her work, and she has prepared for it.  Through unnatural darkness she flies, through strange clutching mists too proud to abandon the city that was theirs once, through warm winds she figures must herald the most beautiful dawn in the world, an angry cry in broken Hen Llinge fading fast behind her.

She is through the air like a bolt, feeling though limbless that her arms and legs are scrambling, murmuring to herself about revenge; about sharp beaks tearing into soft royal flesh, about daggers in fancy kingly spines.  She is out of the city like a shot, and with such feverish intent that she misses the golden shadow passing overhead.

ii.

Blood.  There is blood under her nails.  There is blood in all the little spaces between her fingers.  Blood in her hair.  Blood on her clothes, up to her elbows, up to her chin.  Blood dribbling out of the pits in her head.  She is covered in blood that will not be washed off and it is all she feels, all she smells.  She will not move for fear of spreading it.  She is tired and frustrated enough to cry, and she does not want to find out if she can cry without eyes.  Her fingers are sticky as if she has been crushing roses in them and she rubs them together to try to get the feeling out.

She still struggles to not press her palms up against her eyes.

iii.

She is dreaming, and here also she is drenched in blood.  Radovid, brat, has followed her here; Radovid, whose face was the last she saw, is before her again.  He is going to laugh at her.  She is going to peel his face off with her blood-sticky fingers.  She is going to tear out _his_ eyes and stuff roses into the sockets as he screams.  She is going to run him through with a stake and roast him over an open flame and feed him to the--

He is gone, and a gleaming figure takes his place, smiling.  She is not as Philippa last saw her, charmed, fiercely adoring; she is shifting and pacing and _looking straight at her_ , and in her eyes there is a wary distance.

 _I'm not gold at all, you know_ , Saskia says, dangerously impassive, deceptively light.

 _Of course you are_ , Philippa answers, because this is a dream and she can say what she damn well pleases.

Saskia does not look away, golden hair and rich brown eyes and great black drake-shadow looming up behind her.  Her jaw clenches, only for an instant.  This is a dream, Philippa tries to remind herself as she tenses.

_How would things have gone, had I been Aleksander?_

Disarming question for a dream to ask.  Philippa opens her mouth to give whatever nonsense dream-answer she can give when one of her wards goes off and jerks her awake.

iv.

She can discern light now, she thinks, though perhaps she is only dreaming again.  How did that piece of shit Vilgefortz manage?  It must help to still have one eye.  And a fancy hidden castle.  And to be halfway up the emperor's backside.  She throws the scalpel back onto the table and falls back against her chair, growling.

And now she _knows_ she is dreaming again because Saskia is back, leaning against what Philippa assumes is the table with her arms crossed, coiling around the room with her wings bowed.  She only stares, and does not speak.  Philippa feels small.

_I don't know what we would have done had you been Aleksander._

_Bullshit._

Saskia's look is hard and profoundly inhuman and Philippa wonders how the hell anyone ever mistook this for a girl.  She licks her lips and tastes iron and hesitates, then:

_Why Saskia?_

It's the dragon's turn to be taken aback long enough that Philippa wakes before hearing an answer, sprawling on her chair in a room she can't tell has gone dark.

v.

_I don't kn-- oh._

The world is in shades of grey, maybe forever, but Saskia will always be a blot of gold.  She has also, apparently, never seen the seas of Skellige before.  Nor any sea at all, perhaps?  Philippa feels it's not the time to ask.  Saskia's terrible gaze is fixed on the horizon, seeing colors that no human eye can.  Philippa sees a great dragon in the sand, spilling over the cliffs and rocks, bigger than anything she's seen in her very long life; and before the dragon on the shore there is the ocean bigger than anything in the world.  Saskia is silent a few moments more before she shifts, and the dragon is small and golden-haired again.

_I don't know why not Aleksander._

That isn't quite was Philippa was asking, but she lets it go, and looks out to the breakers that help her tell the difference between sea and sky.

_I would have liked to have trusted you._

Philippa doesn't answer; nor does she react when something the wrong kind of soft is pressed into her hand.  She doesn't have to look to know that it's a rose, or that Saskia is gone.

vi.

She flies blind often these days.  It's not easier, but she prefers to remember.  It's not like her sight now is the same as it was before.

She hoped, in the early days, to give herself eyes with which to see things invisible to the human eye, but it never took.  She has shades of red and green now, but nothing else; if there is a way to see more, she does not know it.  It could be a problem with the brain, she's considered.  The human brain can only understand what the human eye can see, and no more.  She is not ready to begin experimenting with brains.  Maybe in another century.

She flies over a city she knows to be stone by the sound the wind makes over the rooftops, and idly follows an eddy in a couple loops.  She does not turn her sightless face down.  She doesn't have to to see the massive winged thing curled up around the highest tower, jaw resting on claws the size of gallows, burning-coal eyes fixed on her.

_I would have liked to have trusted you, too._


End file.
